In honor of the first visit by Pope Francis and the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, the Penn Museum, in conjunction with the Penn Libraries, offers Sacred Writings: Extraordinary Texts of the Biblical World, a special exhibition of rare artifacts from the Museum Collection and rare books and manuscripts from the Penn Libraries. On view August 15 through November 7, Sacred Writings provides the centerpiece experience for a Museum visit, where a special focus on the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Canaan and Ancient Israel galleries and beyond affords visitors a unique opportunity to delve into ancient cultures and Bible-era art and artifacts.

Ten texts are featured in Sacred Writings: Extraordinary Texts of the Biblical World:

Treasures from the Penn Museum:

One of the world’s oldest fragments of the gospel of Saint Matthew, written on papyrus and dating to the 3rd century CE, was once part of a codex (book). This fragment, written in ancient Greek, contains the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew (Chapter 1: 1-9 and 12-20), a section that details the lineage of Jesus. (This is one of two genealogies of Jesus provided in the New Testament; the Gospel of Luke offers a largely different genealogy).

An ancient clay tablet in Sumerian cuneiform from the site of Nippur in Mesopotamia (now in Iraq), circa 1650 BCE, contains the earliest version of the Mesopotamian flood story.  This tale becomes part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and tells of a flood that destroyed humankind—the story closely parallels the biblical story of Noah.

A richly decorated, illuminated Qur’an from Iran, believed to have been made in Cairo in 1164, is written in Naskhi (early Arabic script), and features the complete text of the Qur’an in black script, with commentary in red script.

Treasures from the Penn Libraries’ Collections:

An illuminated Latin Bible produced in Arras, France in the late 13^th century.

The first authorized Roman Catholic translation of the New Testament Bible into English, printed at Reims, France, through the efforts of English Catholic exiles, in 1582.

The first complete Bible printed in the New World, a monumental translation of the Bible into the Native American Massachuset language, by Puritan missionary John Eliot, in 1663.

A polyglot New Testament Bible compiled by German scholar Elias Hutter with side by side text in twelve languages—Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, English, Danish, and Polish—printed in Nuremberg in 1599.

A late 15^th century Italian illustrated manuscript copy of Werner Rolevinck’s history of the world from the creation to the election of Pope Sixtus IV.

An early 16^th century Rabbinic Bible from the famed Hebrew printing house of Daniel Bomberg in Venice, Italy.

A limited edition contemporary Bible from the Pennyroyal Caxton Press, 1999, designed and illustrated by Barry Moser.

Bringing together scholars from diverse areas at the University of Pennsylvania, Sacred Writings: Extraordinary Texts of the Biblical World is co-curated by Dr. Mitch Fraas, Curator, Special Collections, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries; Dr. Renata Holod, Curator, Near East Section; Dr. Phillip Jones, Associate Curator and Keeper, Near East Section, Penn Museum; Dr. Steve Tinney, Associate Curator-in-Charge, Near East Section, Penn Museum; and Dr. Jennifer Wegner, Associate Curator, Egyptian Section, Penn Museum.

Bible Era and Bible Region Galleries

In addition to the special exhibition, visitors interested in the biblical era and region can step back in time to explore rare art, artifacts and large-scale photographs in several galleries: the Museum’s renowned Egypt (Sphinx) gallery and a side gallery, Amarna, Ancient Egypt’s Place in the Sun; Iraq’s Ancient Past: Rediscovering Ur’s Royal Cemetery; Canaan and Ancient Israel; and Sacred Spaces: The Photography of Ahmet Ertug, featuring spectacular large-scale photographs of Byzantine-era churches in Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Cappadocia region of Turkey.

About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of Penn’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than 7 million volumes, over 100,000 journals, some 2 million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through our collaborative relationships, we supplement Penn’s great local collections with physical access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately 5 million items), the combined holdings of the Ivies (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some 2 million public domain titles in the HathiTrust. Today, the Libraries play an instrumental role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for groundbreaking work in digital library design.  To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.

About the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
The Kislak Center is a vibrant space that brings together people, technology and unique content.  Located on the top floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, it was redesigned in 2013 to allow several different groups to interact with objects of study simultaneously, increasing the use of primary resources in the University’s curriculum and access to the Libraries’ resources for the larger scholarly community.  Today the Kislak Center encompasses the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Furness Memorial Shakespeare Library, the Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. To learn more about the Kislak Center, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu/kislak.

About the Penn Museum
The Penn Museum (the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) is dedicated to the study and understanding of human history and diversity. Founded in 1887, the Museum has sent more than 350 archaeological and anthropological expeditions to all the inhabited continents of the world. With an active exhibition schedule and educational programming for children and adults, the Museum offers the public an opportunity to share in the ongoing discovery of humankind’s collective heritage.

PeerJ is one of a number of open access initiatives currently funded through the collections budget. Those initiatives include subscriptions to BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/), a large open access journal platform, arXiv (http://arxiv.org/), the long established physics preprint database, and Scoap3 (http://scoap3.org/), a partnership of libraries and funding agents to convert high energy physics journals to open access. The libraries are also supporting initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched (http://collections.knowledgeunlatched.org/collection-availability-1/), which forms library and publisher partnerships to support open access publication of books on specialized topics, Open Library of the Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org/), which is creating an open access mega journal and supporting the publication of open access scholarly books, and finally the Open Access Network (http://openaccessnetwork.org), which seeks to develop a new model of centralized funding for open access.

The Penn Libraries are anxiously awaiting the beginning of the Fall 2015 semester and the events surrounding New Student Orientation (NSO). From August 20th-28^th there will be a variety of events that will acquaint new students and their parents with our libraries and their services.

These events include:

1)      A showcase of all the Penn Libraries to highlight the libraries resources and services and provide tours of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

2)      A scavenger hunt  that will lead students to libraries throughout the Penn campus

The showcase will take place on Friday, August 21^st from 12:00pm until 2:30pm. This flagship event will include tours, presentations, and a showcase of tables staffed by librarians from various libraries and library departments across campus.

The scavenger hunt will take place from Friday, August 21st until Friday, August 28^th using the Scavify app. Once a player has registered for the hunt, they will find a slew of clues that requires them to interact with the Libraries and their resources by completing Photo, GPS Check-in, and Question and Answer Challenges.  There is a point value attached to every challenge and prizes will be awarded to the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd highest scorers after game play is finished. Stay tuned to our @upennlib social media channels for more prize-related information. This event is only open to undergraduate members of the Class of 2019. Information on registration and game play will be available at all of our NSO events.

Please come out and visit our spaces during these times. We look forward to meeting all of our new Penn students and parents!

For more information on all of the Libraries’ NSO activities, consult the following guide: http://guides.library.upenn.edu/nso

This is the eighth year that the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards have supported student projects. The awards are managed by the Penn Libraries in collaboration with the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF).

Below are details about this year’s eight funded projects:

• Alicia Chon (W’16) will further the exploration of beauty she started building on her website, The Raw Book in the context of her Korean heritage. She plans to explore a project featuring portraits of people she encounters and their answer to the simple question: “What is beauty?” Alicia will use a digital camera to capture these portraits as she travels to at least five countries in the coming year.

• Under the guidance of Assistant Professor of History, Dr. Tamara Walker, DeDe DeDe (C’16) will conduct research for his honors history thesis on the invention of the steel drum. DeDe will use audio and visual sources in the form of oral history and tradition, musical recordings, and videos of Trinidad and Tobago’s world famous carnival. DeDe explains his decision to present his research as a documentary, saying “a multimedia format…seems to be the most appropriate method of presenting research on the steel drum which is about movement and sound and the active creation of culture.”

• Carolina English (C’16), under the guidance of Dr. Gary Hatfield, Seybert Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Visual Studies department, will be experimenting with an installation that recreates the experiences of a woman named Dee Fletcher chronicled in Melvin Goodale and David Milner’s award-winning book, Sight Unseen. After an unfortunate accident, Dee Fletcher suffered damage to her brain’s ventral stream. She was unable to identify obstacles in front of her, but was still able to move out of the obstacle’s way without intervention. Carolina will attempt to recreate this experience by installing an “imaginary” obstacle course that the brain perceives as real. This installation would amplify the ventral stream’s action of identification, making the viewer more aware of its processing and more empathetic to people without it. She will create a short documentary that will highlight her procedures, shortcomings, and ultimate outcome with the hope that it will produce a more tangible and relatable project.

• Working under the direction of Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, Dr. Walter Licht, Taylor Evensen (C ’16) will use an audio recorder and video camera to interview Cuban exiles in Miami for her thesis research. This project will provide clarity to the history of American-Cuban relations by analyzing the property expropriations of the United Fruit Company, Francisco Sugar Company, and Manatí Sugar Company. Through her work, Evensen aims to provide a more inclusive picture of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and its far-reaching effects.

• Antoni Gierczak (C’16), under the guidance of Richard Wesley, Undergraduate Chair and Adjunct Professor of Architecture in PennDesign, will create an interactive media installation in a corridor on campus. A server will check Facebook and Twitter for a user’s particular hashtag and interpret the bundled information using infrared sensors and the server. This information will then be processed by an Arduino system, which will produce color blocking and images pulled from Google within the installation. Gierczak’s goal is to revitalize the corridor by offering an attractive circulatory alternative and allowing the user to interact with, decipher, and create content within the system in a way that blurs the strict spatial divisions between human and architecture.

• Justin Kagotho (HISB, C’18, W’18) will be working under the direction of Dr. Sara Byala, Senior Lecturer at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, in conducting research about Coca-Cola’s influence in Africa. To conduct this research, Kathogo will visit Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Cameroon. This research will entail such activities as conducting oral interviews with locals, officials working in the Coca-Cola factories, as well as the retailers selling the product. During his time in Africa, Kathogo will visit Coca-Cola bottling factories, clean water facilities, and explore other Coca-Cola initiatives.

• As an undergraduate fellow of Penn CAMRA (a new student organization promoting the use of new media for documenting research results) and working with advisor Mariam Durrani, Christopher Kao (ENG’18) will continue to explore new ways of conveying information through autostereographic video software he has created using Xbox Kinect. Autostereographic video is a breakthrough technology that allows viewers to see 3D images on a normal screen, without the need of any special glasses.

• Under the guidance of Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn, Term Professor in Anthropology, Dr. Adriana Petryna, Eileen Wang (C’16) will be studying the sociocultural context of cesarean deliveries on maternal request for them in Shanghai, China. As part of the ethnographic research for her Health and Societies thesis, she will be using a Zoom audio recorder to capture interviews with doctors, nurses, pregnant women, new mothers, and family members at a district hospital on the topic of birth and delivery. With this data, she hopes to understand how these various factors interact in shaping how Chinese mothers give birth and how they fit into the larger picture of the rising rates of cesarean sections in the country.

Jeff Seltzer (W’78) serves on the Libraries’ Board of Overseers, the Advisory Board of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, and the Alumni Advisory Committee for the Wharton Sports Business Initiative. The Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards Committee consists of Dr. David Barnes (Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science), Inge Herman (Executive Director, Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business), John MacDermott (Director for Instructional Technology, SAS Computing), Ian Seltzer (C’09), and Dr. Anu Vedantham (Director, Penn Libraries’ Weigle Information Commons). Award details are available at http://commons.library.upenn.edu/seltzer-family-digital-media-awards.

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About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of Penn’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than 7 million volumes, over 100,000 journals, some 2 million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through our collaborative relationships, we supplement Penn’s great local collections with physical access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately 5 million items), the combined holdings of the Ivies (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some 2 million public domain titles in the HathiTrust. Today, the Libraries play an instrumental role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for groundbreaking work in digital library design.  To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.

The Penn Alerts Table of Delivery Service has been phased out. Over the years, notification services have evolved to help researchers stay current with journal literature and to customize the kinds of alerts that interest them. Nearly a decade ago, Penn Alerts was an early entry into this field of technologies.

But in recent years, as faculty and students have adopted easier and more customizable current awareness tools, many of them available at no cost through other services licensed by the Penn Libraries, the use of Penn Alerts has greatly declined. With these more sophisticated tools at hand, and user interest shifting dramatically in new directions, we now see the need to retire this service.

In an effort to assist you in converting to more current alternatives, we have created this site, guides.library.upenn.edu/alerts, with links to resources that allow for table of contents, topical, author, and citing article alerts. In addition, your school or departmental library liaison can work with you directly to evaluate your needs and set up an alternative notification service.

Thank you for your patience and flexibility during this transition.

In preparation for the construction, work needs to be done to the heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems that run along a portion of the ceiling on the fifth floor. To allow access to the ceiling, books in stack ranges C (Auxiliary Sciences of History) and a portion of D (World History) will be temporarily relocated to a compact shelving area within Van Pelt Library.

We have taken every measure to limit the disruption of the use of these items. Beginning in July and ending in the late fall, books from the previously mentioned ranges will have to be requested for delivery through Faculty Express or for pickup at the Van Pelt Circulation Desk. Both of these services are accessible through Franklin (http://franklin.library.upenn.edu), found on the Penn Libraries homepage.

The Kislak Center Reading Room will remain open during all phases of the construction project. Patrons are asked to please request materials in advance to ensure they are retrieved and available.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have questions or concerns about the general collection materials affected by the construction project, please contact Richard Griscom (Acting Director, Collection Development; griscom@upenn.edu) or Jon Shaw (Director, Logistics and Access Services; jshaw4@upenn.edu). For questions about special collections materials, please contact Will Noel (Director, Kislak Center; wgnoel@upenn.edu).

On Monday, June 16, I had the privilege of delivering the commencement address to the graduating class of Kensington International Business High School (KIBHS).  The honor of speaking to such a promising group of young students is one that I owe to Matt Pilecki of the Penn Libraries, who extended the initial invitation. Jon Jacobs of Philadelphia Academies, Inc.reached out to Matt in April about potential speakers at Penn. Matt and Jon have collaborated on several outreach initiatives in the past, including a business clothing drive at Penn Law that resulted in the collection of over 1,000 articles of clothing for high school students entering the workforce or pursuing higher education.

KIBHS serves students from Latino and African American backgrounds, many of whom face tremendous challenges in the pursuit of an education. These are challenges that I certainly understand as a Black first-generation college student.  Building on the commitment to community outreach established by Ancil George and Penn Libraries’ Group on Library Diversity (GOLD), I decided to use this opportunity to share the tests and trials I faced during my own educational journey.  My goal was to inspire hope in the graduates, to let them know that despite their challenges, if they press on, a testimony awaits them on the other side of victory. The graduates, parents and staff received the message with warmth and gratitude, a gift that I will cherish always.

Penn Libraries and the GOLD group proudly salute the graduating class of 2015. May your future be bright and prosperous!

PHILADELPHIA, PA  The University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University, and West Chester University are pleased to announce the launch of Pennsylvania Research Commons. The Commons is a new digital portal that showcases research and academic scholarship conducted in Pennsylvania, from undergraduate journals to faculty monographs, and makes this work openly accessible to scholars around the world. The new digital portal site features a real-time global readership map, highlighting the international reach and significance of research from Pennsylvania institutions.

“Global impact is one of the cornerstones of our strategic plan, and portals like the Pennsylvania Research Commons help to expand and measure the reach of Penn scholarship around the world,” says Shawn Martin, the Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions and hosted by bepress on its Digital Commons platform, the Pennsylvania Research Commons aggregates content from the institutional repositories of nineteen Pennsylvania institutions. Institutional repositories are playing an increasingly significant role in the way universities share, manage, and preserve their scholarly outputs.

Walter Cressler, the Science Librarian and Repository Administrator at West Chester University, states, “The Pennsylvania Research Commons enhances the impact of the state’s institutional repositories by providing a platform for regional scholarly and creative collaboration and a showcase that highlights some of the unique resources of Pennsylvania.”

The Commons includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work. Users can type in search terms for easy discovery or browse content by institution, discipline, or author.

The Commons also showcases unique collections and notable archives of regional interest and local history, providing primary materials for research about the Keystone State. Daniel Kipnis, Senior Education Librarian and Editor of the Jefferson Digital Commons at Thomas Jefferson University, notes: “The Pennsylvania Research Commons (PRC) is a great online portal to share high quality research being conducted in the Keystone State.  Along with capturing conferences on various topics, the PRC also highlights oral histories and other special collections for a global audience. Thomas Jefferson University is pleased to contribute to this valuable portal.”

Visit the Pennsylvania Research Commons at http://pennsylvania.researchcommons.us/

For more information, contact:

Shawn Martin, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania, at

shawnmar@pobox.upenn.edu

http://repository.upenn.edu/

For more information, contact:

Daniel Kipnis, Senior Education Librarian and Editor of the Jefferson Digital Commons at Thomas Jefferson University, at

Daniel.Kipnis@jefferson.edu

http://jdc.jefferson.edu/

For more information, contact:

Walter Cressler, Science Librarian at West Chester University, at

wcressler@wcupa.edu

http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/

About bepress

Bepress is the provider of Digital Commons, the leading hosted institutional repository software platform. Digital Commons is a suite of tools and services that enables institutions to manage, display, and publish scholarship to the web in a beautiful, highly visible showcase. Digital Commons offers the features of a traditional institutional repository as well as professional-grade publishing software, management tools, and individual faculty and researcher pages to promote and disseminate scholarship and serve academia.

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Carol and Erwin (FA’58) Welsch shared a life-long passion for Eliot’s verse, meticulously assembling the entire body of published work of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. According to Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, David McKnight, Erwin’s interest in Eliot began in a Modern poetry course he took at Penn. Erwin was enthralled by Eliot’s “rhythmic, jarring-yet-masterful poetry.” The Welsches spent fifty years amassing this collection, a challenging and expensive pursuit that produced a precious gift for the Penn Libraries.

Notable items in the Welsch Collection include:

• Lytton Strachey’s copy of Prufrock and other Observations
• Eliot’s fourth book Ara Vos Pres (An edition that once belonged to Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware Eliot and bears the signature of the American poet, Yvor Winters)
• Publisher and editor of Poetry and Drama Harold Munro’s annotated copy of Eliot’s Poems 1909-1925

Beyond the important achievement of collecting Eliot firsts, Carol and Erwin expanded the scope of their Eliot collection to include enough ephemera and secondary sources to delight both the serious scholar and casual observer.

Members of the Penn community can access the Welsch collection at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.

About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of Penn’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than 7 million volumes, over 100,000 journals, some 2 million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through our collaborative relationships, we supplement Penn’s great local collections with physical access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately 5 million items), the combined holdings of the Ivies (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some 2 million public domain titles in the HathiTrust. Today, the Libraries play an instrumental role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for groundbreaking work in digital library design.  To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.

About the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts

The Kislak Center is a vibrant space that brings together people, technology and unique content.  Located on the top floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, it was redesigned in 2013 to allow several different groups to interact with objects of study simultaneously, increasing the use of primary resources in the University’s curriculum and access to the Libraries’ resources for the larger scholarly community.  Today the Kislak Center encompasses the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Furness Memorial Shakespeare Library, the Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. To learn more about the Kislak Center, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu/kislak.

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You can combine your Catalog & Articles+ results on a single page. Or click on a tab to search just Catalog or Articles+. These options are explained in greater detail below.

Franklin: Catalog & Articles+ is the default search.

Franklin: Discovery (Catalog & Articles+)

Search results are displayed in 2 columns: Catalog on the left, Articles+ on the right.

Searching Catalog & Articles+ displays two columns of results from resources included in both the Libraries Catalog and the Articles + collection. You may select a title from either column to view detailed information about the resource.

To see the full results from either collection, select the View and Filter option that appears at the top of each column.  Selecting View and Filter will also allow you to filter your results to target your retrieval.

Franklin: Discovery (Catalog)

This interface is the Franklin Catalog that we’ve used for years!  It contains records for many types of material including books, ebooks, journal and newspaper titles, manuscripts, conference proceedings, musical scores, and more.

Franklin: Catalog should look familiar. For the first half of 2015, this was the available Franklin search.

Note: If you enter a search in Franklin: Discovery using one tab, you can change your mind and select another tab without losing your current search.  Rest assured, your search will follow you into the new collection!

Franklin: Discovery (Articles+)

Articles+ is a great place to begin your research journey! This new search tool allows you to browse the content within most of the Penn Libraries holdings.

Along with typing in your search terms, you can limit search results using the following options:

• Scholarly & peer-review only
• Full text only
• Exclude Newspapers
• Search beyond the Penn collection

Use Franklin: Articles+ to search for articles. Try setting some checkbox limits first.

The Articles+ results page also provides a number of “filters” that display on the left panel allowing you to target your retrieval to the most relevant items.  If you are off-campus, be sure to follow the Log-In prompt. Following the Log-In prompt will display even more resources.

Articles+ results appear in a new interface.

Key Features:

• Moving your mouse over a resource will display “fly out” content on the right margin, giving you more information about the resource.
• Clicking a title will direct you to the resource.  If the item is not available full-text, look for the PennText button to check whether Penn Libraries has a print copy or to request the item via our document delivery service.
• Clicking the folder icon will mark the resource for printing, downloading, or emailing.

Accessing Franklin: Discovery

Franklin: Discovery will be accessible from the Penn Libraries Homepage.  Enter your search terms and press GO.  Remember, Franklin: Discovery will search both the Catalog & Articles+ collections.  If you want to search just the Catalog, select the Catalog button before you press GO.

The new Franklin searches are available from the Libraries homepage

Happy searching!